EDI has a dark underbelly

A “diversity” expert promoting racism might sound paradoxical. But is it? In 2021, Google had to remove its diversity head over an old blogpost in which he reflected on the Jews and their “insatiable appetite for war and killing”. Now, we seem to have his British equivalent. 

There are many things my childhood self never expected of modern life. That innocent young lad always knew that the flying cars and food machines of The Jetsons were probably a stretch, but even then he didn’t expect quite so much of his future day-to-day existence to instead revolve around removing neo-Nazi propaganda from his field of vision.

Regardless, this is now one of the many integral elements of the 2025 experience that we have normalised into the mundanity of our daily routine. As with charity chuggers, wasps and Hollyoaks, there is no way to actively proof oneself against bumping into examples of the most virulent kind of online antisemitism at the most inopportune moments, and for those of moral integrity there is little else to do but theatrically shoo it out of sight with a well-aimed swipe, like a cartoon washerwoman chasing away pigeons from her freshly-laundered bloomers.

Recently, my browser crash-landed into a particularly monstrous account — a real blizzard of anti-Jewish spite and approving reposts of antisemitic golden oldies. All the greatest hits were here — the “Jews did 9/11”, terrorist attacks are “Israeli false flags”, and a particularly pungent cut decrying Jewish “rat ideology.” The ambition of accounts like this one always remains consistent – pulling the present-day equivalents of Der Stürmer headlines off a set menu and lining them up like paper dollies, a curiously humdrum act of evil.

Unsurprisingly, this poisonous little piece of the internet was also doing backflips to celebrate the equally humdrum evil of Bob Vylan and the various incendiary performers at this year’s Glastonbury festival. Acres of opinion pieces have already been written about these recent developments, and how the BBC’s conciliatory statements for what they have attempted to undersell as sitcom-style mishaps don’t particularly square with the intentional, politically partisan editorial decisions they are supposed to have been addressing. The BBC’s apology insisted that Bob Vylan’s comments “have no place on our airwaves”, conveniently sidestepping the fact that they clearly do, otherwise nobody would have felt empowered to broadcast them.

It’s not for nothing that the rumour mill is currently predicting an imminent fall for Director General Tim Davie, given the Glastonbury farrago is but the latest in a very long line of recent BBC scandals. The bigger story here is just how many of these ideological pratfalls seem to involve antisemitism on the BBC itself, the overly long leash given to BBC staff accused of antisemitic conduct, or BBC News’s major impartiality breaches over the Gaza war coverage. It’s almost as if the BBC has a problem with … racism?

But how can this be, you ask! The BBC is an industry leader in diversity training! They currently boast the largest inclusion team they have ever carried in their century plus of existence, led by a “Head of Creative Diversity” and encompassing nine separate staff networks, mandatory anti-racism training modules for all employees, and even a glossy, self-congratulatory booklet entitled “You Belong” (adorned with corporate platitudes and a photo of Bradley Walsh larking around with Fire from Gladiators as if to say “we’ve solved it at last, lads!”) As of last September, a commissioning policy was introduced which stated that all programme pitches, regardless of quality or intent, would be rejected if the production team was made up of anything less than 25 per cent people from “diverse backgrounds”. So why then, given this atmosphere of what you might charitably call a well-meaning overcorrection regarding the BBC’s attitude to anti-racism and inclusion in the workplace, are there more racism scandals than ever before? And why are they nearly all at the expense of Jews?

If we still don’t know who will watch the watchmen, who will provide anti-racism training for the racist anti-racism trainers?

It might be instructive to ask an expert named Sue Caro. Caro, a white woman of privileged extraction, is one of the most influential and experienced diversity advisors in the UK today. A presence in British media since the early 1990s, working at Channel 4 under her mentor Peter Salmon, she also had stints at LWT and Sky, spent 5 years as a Diversity lecturer at Westminster University, was Diversity Auditor at the British Film Institute responsible for overseeing grants and funding, and has had career associations with organisations including the UN, the Council of Europe, SOAS and the Thomson Foundation where she is currently affiliated. Most notably she was the Senior Diversity Manager at the BBC for over 10 years (from 2001-2011), during which time she co-authored the BBC’s Journalism Diversity Toolkit (for the uninitiated, a “toolkit” is what a booklet gets called when it’s held by somebody wearing a lanyard) and permanently shaped the Corporation’s approach to inclusion, diversity training and combatting prejudice. She has even returned sporadically as a freelancer, most recently in 2018 as an advisor on CBeebies’s My World Kitchen, an amiable Ainsley Harriott cookery show for pre-schoolers.

Oh, and you know the owner of that highly antisemitic X account I was referring to earlier? The one that reposted the material about the “Jews doing 9/11”? And “false flags”? And “rat ideology”? That’s Sue Caro as well. Yes, the exact same person who has made a substantial living as a door-to-door diversity saleswoman is also your friendly neighbourhood purveyor of the kind of Nazi platitudes that would make the average Stormfront reader blush over his Iron Cross. At which point you might well wonder — if Caro permanently shaped the BBC’s approach to anti-racism, what shape exactly did she make it? And if we still don’t know who will watch the watchmen, who will provide anti-racism training for the racist anti-racism trainers?